“I am not
political
not a contentious issue
indigestible message
awkward discussion
frightening character
radical or misfit
I am not an ist or an ism
not your bumper sticker
campaign slogan
not an outburst or sit-in
not a rally or raised fist
I am like all the other tragedies
you so meticulously comb through
write reports on
build memorials for
and give Oscars to
I am not partisan politics
a singular narrative
a rigid immoderate activist
I am the story your children whisper at night
the one you can’t seem to remember
when making calculated decisions”—Remi Kanazi (excerpted from Poetic Injustice)
Overview
Palestine—Falasteen in Arabic.
As I hinted at in the intro, this first trip of about two months will likely be the most emotionally and politically intense out of all the others. It’s going to be depressing and infuriating much of the time, but again, I’ll try to also show the land, the people, and their culture not just through the lens of injustice, but on their own terms; anyone who knows Palestinians know that, as with most people around the world experiencing oppression, they dislike just be being passive objects of humanitarian sympathy. So sorry-not-sorry if you don’t want to be reading about a lot of heavy stuff as I dive in to this first trip–it matters. Some personal background on me and Palestine & Israel/Zionism: I’ve been to this land over ten times now (mostly as a kid), to visit family in my dad’s side who moved to the state of Israel around 1970. The first time I was less than a year old, in 1994 or ‘95; my parents brought me in a cardboard box cradle on the plane. We came to the Tel Aviv area I think most summers during the time of the Second Intifada, though I had no idea what was going on. The fact that I, as an American Jewish kid, was able to travel around without having to know what was happening around me, while it had been part of the reality for every Palestinian kid for decades, says a lot. I was able to frolic around a land that I had no direct ancestors from, while Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967 and onwards who had actually lived there did not have that same right. The last time I was here was 2010 on a trip with people from my summer camp, when I still barely registered Palestinians’ existence. Since then, as many friends and family know, I began to question Zionism and the state of Israel more and became active in Students for Justice in Palestine when I started in the communist indoctrination system that is academia.
So it makes sense for me to be starting out in a place I have such a cute history with, to be exploring it and its people in a way radically different from how I have in the past. I have developed my own views over the past seven or so years interacting with many sources–articles, footage, books, testimonies–from Palestinian and Israeli narratives, and I fully acknowledge that those views will inevitably affect how I write about what I see. Call me “biased” if you want, even though I was still pretty Zionist myself up through 2013. I am by no means not close to being an expert who knows everything, and after this short trip I still will not be. Only someone who makes a career out of studying this, or an actual Palestinian on the ground, can truly know what it’s like to live under the Israeli system of occupation, expansion, siege, and yes, I would say apartheid. My rough itinerary is traveling with the Eyewitness Palestine (a DC-based organization) delegation for two weeks, mostly in the West Bank, then spending a month at the Tent of Nations farm south of Bethlehem. My aunt incidentally lives on a settlement nearby, but I will visit her and my cousins within the “Green Line” of Israel for a few days afterwards in December (still using my privilege of free movement, but at least I won’t be on a settlement). I will then spend my last week in Jordan next door.
I will give some basic historical context on each place I go to for the whole year, but most of it we’ll learn about in more detail while I’m on the ground. Of course I’m starting off with one of the toughest to give context for. Here is an extremely condensed version of the region’s 6,000-year history and the current peoples and politics, especially the century-old mess that is Zionism and the state of Israel. Sorry if a lot of this is completely new for anyone reading, I know from personal experience that this topic can be very overwhelming, and often just gets reduced to painfully lengthy back-and-forth Facebook debates, so feel free to ask me for more resources to check out! If most of it is familiar, you still may want to at least skim it, as there are some bits of info in it that even I learned only recently that often get overlooked. And if there is a particular part you think I should be corrected on, please feel free to let me know. Most of the bits on the older history are from my own historical knowledge off the top of my head, shamelessly double-checked with the infallible Wikipedia. The parts about the more recent politics are also my own view of the history, collectively shaped by the many sources I’ve looked at over the years, supplemented most recently with a solid overview by the Middle East Research and Information Project, link available here. https://www.palestine-studies.org/institute/fellows/primer-palestine-israel-and-arab-israeli-conflict
The land was inhabited by pagan Canaanite peoples in the Bronze Age; some of the oldest cities in the land are traced to earlier than 4000 BC. Canaan was influenced by various empires, especially the Egyptians, until the early Jews established the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, if you know your Bible, around the year 1000. For hundreds of years the Judeans fought off Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans, until the Romans crushed the last major Jewish revolts in 70 and 135 AD. The Romans expelled most Jews, beginning our global diaspora (though some Jews still lived in the land, now called Syria-Palestina, over the next two thousand years). The Byzantines (the eastern Roman Empire) then ruled it until the early Islamic empire of the Arabs took it in the 7th century. Starting in around 1100, Palestine then went back and forth between European crusaders, Turks, and Arabs (often Egyptian) for another four hundred years before the Ottoman Turks came out on top. All these boring dates and empire names leave out the more juicy and interesting details, but you get the idea how Palestine was at such a crossroads between so many converging cultures. Over these many years, churches, mosques, and synagogues were built, captured, destroyed, and rebuilt, especially near holy sites. People migrated into and fled out of the land. Poor and wealthy families of different faiths and sects spread their roots in the soil. Muslims fought one another, Christians fought one another. It is also important to keep in mind also that religions didn’t always have to clash–in many periods local Muslims, Jews, and Christians got along with each other fine. Jews and Muslims in fact fought together to defend cities like Jerusalem against the crusaders, while the Catholic crusaders also killed local Eastern Christians on campaigns.
The Ottoman Empire rose and declined, becoming the “sick old man of Europe,” and finally fell at the end of World War I in November 1918, exactly one hundred years ago. Britain and France carved up the Middle East into mandates, which were planned to be generously granted independence by their benevolent European overlords down the road; Britain got the Mandate of Palestine. There were about 750,000 people in the land at this time: 600,000 Muslim, 80,000 Jewish, 70,000 Christian, 7,009 Druze, and a few hundred Baha’i, Sikh, and Samaritan in the mix. Some of the Arabic Jews were from families who had lived there for centuries, but most of them had come from outside Palestine (mostly Europe) in the thirty or forty years prior, and this is where I’ll really have to simplify things a lot. In the 1880s, some European Jews started the Zionist movement, with the aim of creating their own state as a solution to anti-Semitism. The biggest issue with this is that of course there wasn’t really a sizeable majority of Jews anywhere to go and start such a state. Various lands were considered but by around 1900 most Zionists had their eyes on Palestine. Some focused their early Zionism on just establishing cultural and language centers, some on socialism, some on religion (though most at this time were secular), but I’d say by the 1920s and 30s, most Zionists had the goal of establishing their own nation-state in part or all of Palestine. A few still had the idea of a “binational state,” which would be an inclusive state without the goal of forcing a Jewish majority, and still have clear provisions for Jewish rights and participation. More and more Zionists moved into Palestine, into cities or establishing their own villages. While many did did buy their land, it was often from absent Palestinian Arab landlords, which led to the eviction of the Arabs who were actually living on that land. To gain their loyalty against the Ottomans in WWI, the British then made promises to both non-Jewish Arabs and to Zionist Jews that they would get self-determination after the war. As it became more clear Zionism was gaining momentum, tensions between Jews and and the Arab Palestinians rose under the British regime in the 1930s and 1940s, breaking out into violence. With the British Empire weak after WWII, the question of Middle Eastern lands including Palestine becoming independent could not be ignored, and Zionism had reached critical mass after the Holocaust.
The issue was turned over to the new United Nations, which came up with a plan to divide the land into one Jewish and one Arab Palestinian state, though because the land was not already neatly divided into Arab and Jewish parts there would be some Jews in the new Palestinian state, and a lot of Palestinian communities in the new Jewish state. The Arabs rejected this plan made by the UN, a new organization based on the other side of the world in New York City, and fighting between them and the Jews intensified. The British left in 1948, the Zionist leaders proclaimed the state of Israel’s independence, and the Arab armies of Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt all attacked. The Israeli militias were able to defend their new state, and in what is now called the Nakba (“catastrophe”), 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were either directly expelled from their homes by the Israelis, or fled when they heard about said expulsions and massacres, hoping to return to their homes they still had keys to if the other Arab armies won. They could not. The new Israeli army’s campaign led to the depopulation of over 500 Palestinian towns. Jordan ended up with control of the West Bank, Egypt with the Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem was split between the state of Israel and Jordan. The new Israeli state heavily discriminated against the Palestinian Arabs still within its borders after the war, who lived under a separate system of military law until the 1960s. Palestinians’ homes and land were often arbitrarily confiscated to make way for new Jewish immigrants from around the world (who the mostly European leadership of Israel also marginalized, as with the Yemeni Jews, often forcibly sterilized in the 1950s). Bedouins in the desert have also had their villages destroyed, sometimes multiple times after returning. The next major war with the neighboring Arab states (whose leaders didn’t genuinely care about Palestinian refugees but had their own political motives) was in 1967, which ended with Israel taking the Golan from Syria, East Jerusalem & the West Bank from Jordan, and Gaza & the Sinai from Egypt. It was this war that made many more Jews around the world, who previously hasn’t been paying much attention, identify more with Zionism. The last major Arab-Israeli war was then 1973, another Israeli victory. Israel made peace with Egypt (returning the Sinai) and Jordan later in the 1970s and ’80s. Israel and militias in Lebanon also came to arms at various points in the ‘80s and ‘90s, with Israel invading the southern part of that country, the last time being 2006.
Israel meanwhile started building the settlements in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank after 1967, and taking resources, especially water aquifers and fertile farmland, for the use of settlers. Early Palestinian resistance (led mainly by the secular PLO, Palestine Liberation Organization) was sometimes nonviolent, sometimes violent, but the Israeli army was always sure to crack down hard. Palestinians then launched the grassroots First Intifada, an uprising, in 1987. The main focus of the First Intifada was nonviolent activism and civil disobedience–Palestinians producing their own goods and agriculture, boycotting Israeli products, refusing to pay Israeli taxes, organizing their own underground schools (the occupation government shut down schools), though there was violent resistance against the Israeli army, and some independent Palestinian militants attacked civilians. Soon the first peace negotiations started in the early 1990s, leading to the first Oslo Accords in 1993. The Israeli government however continued to further expand the settlements and land confiscation throughout the decade, and the next round of Oslo negotiations did not go well; in 2000, Palestinian officials led by Yasser Arafat rejected the Camp David deal, which still divided up much of the West Bank, Gaza, & East Jerusalem with larger settlements, didn’t provide for the return of many refugees to their homeland, and kept valuable areas with water resources like the Jordan Valley under Israeli control. Israeli PM Ehud Barak then canceled the 2001 Taba negotiations (which by all accounts were going much better) just a couple weeks before elections. A Second Intifada broke out at the end of 2000 through 2005, this one more violent than the first, and the Israeli army repressed it even more brutally. Israel started constructing the infamous Wall within the West Bank, in many cases dividing up Palestinian towns and farmland, though the wall was still largely incomplete even when the uprising wound down in 2005.
Israeli leaders realized that in the Gaza Strip, it wasn’t worth managing so many troops protecting only a small amount of settlers in a land that was less valuable than the West Bank; Israel withdrew the settlers from Gaza in 2005 while continuing to expand West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements. In the first full democratic Palestinian elections, about 45% of voters elected Hamas (a more religiously extreme group that still used violence and terrorism against Israelis, and had also gained a lot support through its social services and charity branch), while most other votes went to the secular Fatah party, which had renounced violence in the ‘90s but was viewed by many as corrupt and too collaborating with the Israeli military. Hamas and Fatah started fighting, and as Hamas took control of Gaza, Israel tightened its land, sea, and air siege on the civilian population. Israel and Hamas fought on and off through June 2008, when a six-month ceasefire started. I personally do not support any particular Palestinian faction (as I am not Palestinian myself), but I will say that top Israeli leaders acknowledge that Hamas stopped its rocket attacks completely for the first five months of the ceasefire, and when some other militias like the Islamic Jihad group once launched rockets, Hamas actually imprisoned them and took away their arms. The Israeli army meanwhile only loosened its siege by about 20 to 30 percent, still drastically restricting Gazan access to food and medical supplies, and shot at Palestinian fisherman and farmers, sometimes killing them. The West Bank settlements also of course continued to eat up more Palestinian land. In November and December, Hamas and other militants in Gaza started attacks again as the Israeli troops arrested some of their members in the West Bank. The ceasefire collapsed, and the first Gaza war started and went into January. The Israeli operation Cast Lead killed 1,300 Palestinians (800 civilians and 500 combatants), while Hamas killed 13 Israelis (3 civilians and 10 soldiers) by the end of January 2009. Thousands more were injured and displaced, their homes and infrastructure destroyed. Israel has continued to siege Gaza for over ten years now, and tensions led to fighting again in 2012 and especially 2014, with operation Protective Edge killing about 1,500 Palestinians civilians and 800 combatants, and Hamas killing 6 Israeli civilians and 67 soldiers, again with thousands more Palestinians being injured and left homeless amidst the ruins.
And so here we are today. The UN has repeatedly warned that Gaza will be be effectively unlivable by 2020, due to lack of clean water, food production, and medical supplies under the blockade. Unemployment is at 44% in Gaza, and 18% in the West Bank. The settlement one of “Area C” takes up 60% of the West Bank, restricting Palestinian life and access to farmland and water more and more. About 800,000 Israelis live in the ever-expanding settlements, including those in the East Jerusalem area, out of almost 7 million Israeli Jews in total. Almost 2 million Palestinians live in Gaza, 3 million in the West Bank & East Jerusalem, and almost 1.5 million within the state of Israel’s Green Line. Several million more refugees and descendants live around the world, mostly in nearby Middle East states like Jordan and Lebanon (where many face further discrimination by other Arab governments, as if they don’t deal with enough already). Refugees are still not allowed to return to homes they have keys and deeds for within Israel, and Palestinians are still subject to legal discrimination within the state. In total, the historic boundaries make the whole land only a bit bigger than New Jersey. Physically, the land is beautiful, from the parts I’ve seen in the past. A lot of people imagine it as all hot desert, but the Naqab desert (Negev in Hebrew) is only the southern part of the land. Many parts of the north and West Bank are quite green and fertile, and much of the inland regions get very hilly, with steep valleys in between. But now, enough ado. Time to go beyond the statistics and debates and headlines to see the land and people for themselves, on their own terms. We’ll start with me getting on a bus in my hometown of Mahwah, New Jersey.
Foreign Fields 